Fishless Cycle Problem

[GTS_MAD]

We recently set up a 2nd tank and was startin to do a fishless cycle it has been a week and a half since adding the ammonia which baught it to 4ppm i have been testin water daily and now the ammonia is 8 ppm im using old filter media to

can anyone help? should i do a water change or shall i just leave the tank running?

 

[GTS_MAD]

just thought i wud add my lfs sells BACTINETTES shall i add a couple pots of this to help the bacteria

 

[drobbyb]

If your ammonia is 8 ppm then you should do a 50% waterchange to bring it down. 8 ppm encourages the wrong species of bacteria to grow. You should aim for 4 to 5 ppm of ammonia.

 

[GTS_MAD]

wont it cycle on its own though?

 

[GTS_MAD]

Here are my readings:

Ammonia - 8ppm
Nitrite - 0.25ppm

PH - 7.6ppm

What would you guys reccomend, as there are no fish in there should i leave the tank to cycle now or do water changes.

 

[rebrn]

As mentioned above 8ppm of ammonia is way to high, you should do water changes to bring that down to around 4-5ppm. If you leave it at 8ppm you will be encouraging the wrong kind of bacteria growth. 4-5ppm ammonia is what you want to for the right kind of bacteria growth to successfully cycle your tank. But if you have no fish it is odd that your ammonia would have gone up from your original 4 to 8. Are you sure there were no hitchhikers in the mature media you added, i.e snail eggs? I know that sounds odd you would think that the ammonia would have killed any living thing, but I recently found baby snails that hatched in my tank, the tank and filter were used, and even though I cleaned the tank with pure ammonia, and did a fish less mini cycle of the filter, some how the snail eggs survived and have hatched.

 

[waterdrop]

I agree with Robby, you just need to do a 50% water change so you can try and get your ammonia concentration closer to 4ppm (actually 3,4,5... doesn't matter, but 8ppm does matter as its too high.) It can be hard sometimes to judge the difference in 4ppm or 8ppm test results but its better to err towards the 4ppm side.

Although most tanks begin to drop ammonia in the first two weeks, we see cases where tanks go 3 or even 4 weeks before the ammonia drops for the first time.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[GTS_MAD]

Ok my ammonia is now 0.50ppm

So how do i cycle the new filter from here, just keep adding ammonia and waiting or put the 2 mollies that were in the tank beofre back in there to help with the cycling?

 

[waterdrop]

No, you don't ever add fish to a tank that's fishless cycling by having household ammonia added to it. Fishless cycling takes a lot of patience and good record keeping. You are in the "unknown zone" of the first few weeks where the first dose of ammonia has been added to the empty tank but the tiny bacterial colony has not reduced it to zero ppm yet. Its very hard to make yourself be patient but you need to simply watch and test it each morning and evening and record the test results in your aquarium notebook (and perhaps as a bottom section of your first post in this thread -- see the first post of member martinking's fishless cycle log for a good format)... anyway you need to wait until it shows that ammonia is now zero ppm. THEN, you will add however many milliliters of your particular household ammonia it takes to raise the ppm back to about 4 (not 8!) You should pick either morning or evening as your "add-time" and always make that the time of day when you add ammonia (IF it needs to be added.) It only ever gets added once in a 24 hour day and only if ammonia reached zero ppm during the previous 24 hours, got that?

Once your ammonia oxidizing bacteria (we call them A-Bacs for short) colony gets large enough, the 4ppm (or 3 or 5ppm) will easily drop to zero ppm within a day and you will be adding more each morning or evening, whichever you choose as your "add-time."

~~waterdrop~~

 

[GTS_MAD]

Thats great thanks WD for that Info, made it alot clearer for me, sorry to be a pain been listening to LFS to much i guess lol